Free Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

their names: purple-throated mountain gems, long-tailed silky flycatchers, scintillant hummingbirds. At dawn we’d witnessed the red-green fireworks of a resplendent quetzal as he burst from his nest cavity, trailing his tail-feather streamers. But there’d been no trace of scarlet yet, save for the scarlet-thighed dacnis (yes, just his thighs—not his feet or lower legs). Having navigated through an eerie morning mist in an elfin cloud forest, we found ourselves at noon among apple orchards on slopes so steep as to make the trees seem flung there instead of planted. All of it was wondrous, but we’d not yet seen a footprint of the beast we’d come here tracking.
    Then a bend in the road revealed a tiny adobe school, its bare-dirt yard buzzing with activity. The Escuela del Sol Feliz took us by surprise in such a remote place, though in Costa Rica, where children matter more than an army, the sturdiest shoes are made in small sizes, and every tiny hamlet has at least a one-room school. This one had turned its charges outdoors for the day intheir white and navy uniforms, so the schoolyard seemed to wave with neat nautical flags. The children, holding tins of paint and standing on crates and boxes, were busy painting a mural on the school’s stucco face: humpbacked but mostly four-legged cows loafing beneath round green trees festooned with round red apples, fantastic jungles dangling with monkeys and sloths. In the center, oversize and unmistakable, was a scarlet macaw. The children’s portrait of their environment was a study in homeland, combining important features of both real and imaginary landscapes; while their macaw surely had more dignity than Long John Silver’s, he was still a fantasy. All of these children had picked apples and driven their family cows across the road, and some may have seen the monkeys they depicted in their mural, but not one, probably, had ever laid eyes on a macaw.
    Ara macao was once everywhere in Costa Rica—in the lowlands at least, on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts—but in recent decades it has been pushed into a handful of isolated refuges as distant as legend from the School of the Happy Sun. Its celebrity in the school’s mural cheered us because it seemed a kind of testimonial to its importance in the country’s iconography, and to the sporadic but growing effort to teach children here to take their natural heritage to heart. We’d come here in search of both things: the scarlet macaw and some manifestation of hope for its persistence in the wild.
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    Our destination was the Corcovado National Park on the Osa Peninsula, where roughly a thousand scarlet macaws constitute the most viable Central American population of this globally endangered bird. The Osa is one of two large Costa Rican peninsulas extending into the Pacific; both are biologically rich, with huge protected areas and sparse human settlements. Corcovado,about one tenth the size of Long Island, is the richest preserve in a country known for its biodiversity: Its bird count is nearly 400 species, and its 140 mammals include all 6 species of cats and all 4 monkeys found in Central America. It boasts nearly twice as many tree species as the United States and Canada combined. The park was established by executive decree in 1975, but its boundaries weren’t finalized until many years later, after its hundreds of unofficial residents had been relocated. Hardest to find were the gold prospectors—who had a talent for vanishing into the forest—and the remnant feral livestock, which disappeared gradually with the help of jaguars.
    For us, Corcovado would be the end of a road that was growing less navigable by the minute as we ventured farther out onto the peninsula. Our overnight destination was Bosque del Cabo, a private nature lodge at the peninsula’s southern tip. Our guidebook had promised that we’d cross seven small rivers on the way, but we